Effective Theories vs illusions

All right, got to learn something about Renormalization. For those who do not know what renormalization is, well, I don't care (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization).
Anyway, where do you learn Renormalization? Of course on books and articles with titles like "Renormalization". Easy till now.

I stumbled on this article by Joseph Polchinski (http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9210046v2.pdf) , who happens to be author of one of the best books on String Theory. (Actually it's a two volumes series on Strings, but who cares about details here?).

Here's a quote (from an hypothetical dialogue Polchinski-student) you can find in the linked article:

Student: "Doesn’t all this mean that quantum field theory, for all its successes,
is an approximation that may have little to do with the underlying theory?
And isn’t renormalization a bad thing, since it implies that we can only probe
the high energy theory through a small number of parameters?"

Polchinski: "Nobody ever promised you a rose garden."


That's for all you unbelievers roaming around shouting that "science is soulless". Fuck off and begin learning some science "the hard way".


[As usual: my english may suck but, man, you all don't have better readings?]